Key Capabilities and Features

With this component, customers can ‘Profile, Snapshot and Protect’ any aspects of their PC Configurations.

Administrators nominate a set of details such as specific registry keys, DLLs and other files, environment variables and other settings, to be collected and saved as a Profile. Any number of Profiles can be created, and customers often profile key applications as well as critical segments of the baseline PC platform.

When a Profile is applied on any given PC, a Snapshot is created that holds all the information items defined in the profile, including complete files. The snapshot can be stored on the individual PC, or on a file server.

Under control of a scheduler, the Configuration Diagnostics agent will periodically compare the PC’s current state with the saved Snapshots and indicate any anomalies in a tree view of the relevant Profiles at the administrator’s console.

Snapshots can also be taken at any time under administrator control and compared either with stored Snapshots or validated Snapshots from other PCs. This sequence of Profile, Snapshot and Compare is often used in system troubleshooting. For example, Diagnostics could create a profile of a problem solution described in a Microsoft KB article, and the Snapshot and Compare procedure be used to determine which machines have, or have not, got the solution in place.

Scaling

Checking a PC’s configuration against stored Snapshots is carried out locally on the PC so scaling does not present a problem at that level. The SOAP based communication between the Diagnostics agent and the Console is also unaffected by scale.

PC Configuration Management and ITIL

ITIL does not make specific recommendations on tools and technologies for configuration management, but the creation and maintenance of stable PC configurations is very much aligned to the concept of best practice in IT that ITIL promotes. In particular we believe this solution has much to offer in ITIL’s area of Change Management, by providing means to record new configuration details and ensure their consistent application across the network.

Available in these Solutions

Configuration Profiling and Diagnostics is exploited in these PC Configuration Management Solutions